Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals

Most of us have no idea why we fail to reach our goals. Now eminent social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson shows us how we can finally win by revealing how goals really work—and by showing us how to avoid what typically goes wrong.

Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence

We all want to experience pleasure and avoid pain. But there are really two kinds of pleasure and pain that motivate everything we do. If you are promotion-focused, you want to advance and avoid missed opportunities. If you are prevention-focused, you want to minimize losses and keep things working. And as Tory Higgins has found in his groundbreaking research, if you understand how people focus, you have the power to motivate yourself and everyone around you.

No One Understands You and What to Do About It

Have you ever felt you're not getting through to the person you're talking to or not coming across the way you intend? You're not alone. That's the bad news. But there is something we can do about it. Heidi Grant Halvorson, social psychologist and best-selling author, explains why we're often misunderstood and how we can fix that. Most of us assume that other people see us as we see ourselves and that they see us as we truly are. But neither is true.

Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future

A step-by-step guide to reinventing youAre you where you want to be professionally? Whether you want to advance faster at your present company, change jobs, or make the jump to a new field entirely, the goal is clear: to build a career that thrives on your unique passions and talents. But to achieve this in today’s competitive job market, it’s almost certain that at some point you’ll need to reinvent yourself professionally.

How do you create your own definition of success - and reach your unique potential? Building a fulfilling life and career can be a daunting challenge. It takes courage and hard work. Too often, we charge down a path leading to “success” as defined by those around us - and ultimately, are left feeling dissatisfied. Each of us is unique and brings distinctive skills and qualities to any situation. So why is it that most of us fail to spend sufficient time learning to understand ourselves and creating our own definition of success?

Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change

The author of the legendary best seller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini, shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn't lie in the message itself but in the key moment before that message is delivered.

Grit: How to Keep Going When You Want to Give Up

Tempted to give up? Here's how to keep going. If you browse through the interviews with some of the most successful people on Earth, you'll find one common piece of advice shared by virtually all of them: They never give up on their big goals. Research shows that grit is a better predictor for success than any other factor. The ability to keep going despite setbacks is more important than your IQ, character, or external factors like your upbringing or surroundings.

The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life

Present moment awareness is an essential ingredient in life if one expects to experience any degree of authentic peace and contentment. It has been acknowledged for centuries as the cornerstone of spiritual awakening in all traditions of Eastern thought. In the West, however, it is still a relatively unrecognized concept for living. The Western mind is always restless, never content with the moment.

Goal Setting: 13 Secrets of World Class Achievers

These 13 “secrets” are the proven formula used by world-class achievers across the ages. We live in a time where many people have lost touch with the qualities that produce extraordinary lives. Imagination, ingenuity, drive, and a no-fear, no-quitters allowed mentality often seem to be disappearing from our culture and our world. This is a book for everyone who has ever had a dream. This book will teach you how to set goals and achieve that dream, step-by-step and day-by-day.

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself

The path to your professional success starts with a critical look in the mirror. If you listen to nothing else on managing yourself, you should at least hear these 10 articles (plus the bonus article "How Will You Measure Your Life?" by Clayton M. Christensen). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles to select the most important ones to help you maximize yourself.

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact. Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how - by saying less and asking more - you can develop coaching methods that produce great results.

Are you overextended, over-distracted, and overwhelmed? Do you work at a breakneck pace all day, only to find that you haven’t accomplished the most important things on your agenda by the time you leave the office? The world has changed and the way we work has to change, too. Manage Your Day-to-Day will give you a toolkit for tackling the challenges of a 24/7, always-on workplace. We’ll show you how to build a rock-solid daily routine, field a constant barrage of messages, find focus amid chaos, and carve out the time you need to do the work that matters.

Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life

How many self-help books are written by authors whose biggest success is selling self-help books? Three Simple Steps is different. Despite stock market crashes, dot-com busts, and the specter of recession, the author started a virtual company from home, using a few thousand dollars of his savings. A few years later, without ever hiring an employee or leaving his home office, he sold it for more than $100 million. As the economy slipped into another free fall, he did this again with a company in a different field. He accomplished this through no particular genius.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

In this must-listen book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and businesspeople - both seasoned and new - that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit". Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur "genius" Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success.

Four Seconds: All the Time You Need to Stop Counter-Productive Habits and Get the Results You Want

The things we want most - peace of mind, fulfilling relationships, to do well at work - are surprisingly straightforward to realize. But too often our best efforts to attain them are built on destructive habits that sabotage us. In Four Seconds, Peter Bregman shows us how to replace negative patterns with energy boosting and productive behaviors. To thrive in our fast-paced world all it takes is to pause for as few as four seconds.

Bull's-Eye: The Power of Focus

Clarity, Focus, and Concentration: Three strong attributes needed to hit the bull's eye! And just as you can develop your physical muscles through hard work and concentration, you can develop your mental muscles through continuous repetition. Bull's Eye will teach you how to unleash your powers for success and accomplish more in the next few months than many people do in a lifetime.

Habits of the Super Rich: Find Out How Rich People Think and Act Differently: Proven Ways to Make Money, Get Rich, and Be Successful

Have you ever wondered what separated you from the highly successful people? Is it because of their "luck"? Or could it be they were in the right place at the right time? While many people believe at least one of those circumstances to be the case, the truth of the matter is that the only difference which separates the highly successful from the rest of us is their daily routine and their mindset. It all can be summed up into one word: Habits. Those who are sitting on the top of their game created a routine or a series of habits that nearly ensured their success.

Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts - Becoming the Person You Want to Be

In business, the right behaviors matter. But getting it right is tricky. Even when we acknowledge the need to change what we do and how we do it, life has a habit of getting in the way, upsetting even the best-laid plans. And just how do we manage those situations that can provoke even the most rational among us into behaving in ways we would rather forget?

Publisher's Summary

Decades of research on achievement suggests people at the top of their game tend to reach their goals because of what they do - not because of who they are. In this short, provocative, and useful HBR Single, motivational psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson translates the psychological secrets of these winning human beings for your use. Halvorson expands on her immensely popular blog post to give more detail on each of her nine suggested actions - from getting specific about goals and aggressively monitoring your achievements to understanding the importance of having "grit."

By emphasizing what successful people do consistently and effectively, Halvorson provides the path to help you accomplish your goals, once and for all.

This short book is an excellent expansion on the author's Harvard Business Review blog post on the same subject. The 9 things successful people do differently are as follows. It is well worth hearing the author flesh these items out:

1. Setting specific goals. Vagueness must be avoided. It must be a clear yes/no that the goal has been achieved.

2. Seize the moment. Always be looking to take advantage of time and opportunity.

3. Monitor progress towards goals, focusing on what is yet to be done.

4. Be optimistic, but realistic too. Realize that big goals are difficult to achieve.

5. Focus on improvement. Don't get hung up on evaluating good/bad. Just keep improving.

6. Grit. Persistence in the face of difficulty.

7. Focus on increasing willpower.

8. Avoid temptation.

9. Focus on positive actions, not on what you will avoid doing, or avoid thinking of.

This book reinforced my interest. I have listened to almost all audible books regarding neuroscience, willpower, and psychology that audible has to offer; and this book blends all of them into a great action plan that I can quickly listen to, to refresh and motivate deliberate practice.

Does the author present information in a way that is interesting and insightful, and if so, how does he achieve this?

Yes, very much so. The author is concise, using understandable and real world examples to explain high level research results. Their is very little self-indulgent reflection by the author; as her attitude towards the subject matter is one of confidence, generosity, and hopefulness that the reader/listener will succeed. I believe she truly wants to help.

What did you find wrong about the narrator's performance?

The performance seemed flawless. However, I listen to most books at 2x or 3x speed, so imperfections are less noticeable. Increased speed also tends to lessen my narrator irritation factor when it comes to voice preferences.

Do you have any additional comments?

I admittedly was inclined to purchase her other book on this site, which is mentioned only twice at the very end of the recording. If you are only looking to use credits, I would suggest skipping this teaser and purchasing her other work: I am assuming it is a more thorough look at this subject matter. If you have a couple of bucks to spend, this audiobook is a great guide that can be revisited very quickly.

I was lead to get this book from the Hardvard bussiness Review podcast. However, I did not find anything else in the audiobook, besides the points already raised in the podcast. The tip about quantitatively defining goals was, for me, the most useful bit of wisdom derived from the book, and this can be stated in a few lines.

The first time I listened I rated it lower, I don't remember why and I didn't write a review. My brother liked it a lot, so that's why I have it another shot.

The second time through I sat down with a piece of paper and wrote down the essentials, writing it in my own words and coming to my own conclusions as well as finding parallels to other things I learned previously.

There are a lot of good information in this very short book and time invested in thinking about them will probably result in developing my ideas on self improvement.